OMG Politicians Lie! Who Knew?
It's an All Liars Edition! Santos! JIm Carrey! Stephen Glass! Sidd Finch! The Isuzu guy!
George Santos is a liar.
He makes Joe Isuzu look credible
He makes that Jon Lovitz character, Tommy Flanagan, look honest.
He makes Jim Carrey’s attempts to lie in the movie “Liar, Liar” seem amateurish by comparison.
Those all may be understatements. He is probably the most serial liar and fraud ever elected to Congress. He has lied about his education, his background, his job, his genealogy, his physical activity, his charitable practices and almost everything on his resume to get elected to New York’s 3rd Congressional District, which represents Nassau County and Long Island. He is such a prolific fabulist, you genuinely can’t determine what he has said that is true and what is just a complete fabrication. As a Republican, he eked through election in a Republican year in which the New York Dems were an utter disaster in swing districts.
It wasn’t until after the election when the facade fell apart. Reporters dug and found a treasure trove; his background was a complete fantasy the likes of which would make Sidd Finch1 and The Great Gatsby2 blush. Calls rang out immediately for him to resign his seat (before even being sworn in) and the Nassau County Republicans, instrumental in getting him elected, called for him to vacate his seat in Congress. It’s not so easy to do though when Republicans have a bare four seat majority in Congress and Kevin McCarthy needs every vote he can get just to remain Speaker of the House. If Santos does resign, this seat goes from barely Republican to Sapphire Blue overnight.
Kevin McCarthy with George Santos in 2020.
Yes, everyone in his district has a right to feel duped. The lengths of Santos’s fraud were putrid. It’s a big, steaming pile of bullshit that you can smell all the way across the country. Santos’s name should go down in infamy.
However, here is a problem with the outrage; all of this should have been caught BEFORE he was elected. It’s an accepted aphorism that politicians lie. Anything that comes out of a candidate’s mouth needs to be taken with a grain of salt. People need to be skeptical when it comes to politics and politicians. This is what a free press and an adversarial, open democratic system are supposed to expose.
Was George Santos some master of deceit, able to cover up all of his lies and tracks? Not in the least. A simple background check would have captured most of his lies. Journalists are supposed to look into candidates on behalf of the public to find and verify this kind of stuff. Campaigns pay thousands, sometimes millions of dollars in opposition research to find these nuggets. “Citizen Journalists” on twitter, blogs and online sites revel in how important they are to the process and find stuff like this all the time on the most trivial of items. You’d think someone, somewhere could have found any of this before November.
Nope.
Everyone was asleep at the switch. Nobody cared. They accepted, and by electing Santos actually liked, the story he gave. He was a gay, Brazilian/Jewish first generation immigrant who went to Horace Mann and Baruch College and NYU (where he graduated with an MBA in the top 1%), was a stud on the volleyball court, worked on Wall Street for Goldman Sachs and Citibank, founded an animal charity, and a host of other statements too good to be true. That kind of C.V. practically demanded verification. Did the press or the campaigns look into of any of it?
Of course not.
It wasn’t until after he won his seat in Congress that people looked into his background, and found the lies THE VERY FIRST DAY. If the lies offended you, that should offend you even more. Frankly, the media and everyone else who didn’t catch this need to have a “come to Jesus” moment about how they failed. The whole thing reminds me of this scene in the 1990s movie “Shattered Glass,” when the editor, played by Peter Sarsgaard, lays it out for another journalist about how they failed
So now he has a seat in Congress. His constituents want him gone because they feel they’ve been had (they were). His colleagues in the GOP want him gone because he makes all of them look bad (he does). The press wants him gone because his a black eye on their lack of investigation (he is). Everyone else across the country want him gone because he epitomizes everything wrong with politics (he does). You know what though, he doesn’t have to leave. He was duly elected to the seat, and its largely his for the next two years. I’m pretty sure he’ll never win election again, and he’ll be ostracized by pretty much everyone, but for now, he’s a vote in McCarthy’s pocket, and McCarthy has no reason to get rid of him (for now). In a democracy, you get the leaders you deserve.
And for all those who were shocked to find out that politicians lie…
PurpleAmerica’s Recommended Stories
First off, a must read for any Political Science student, and as long as we are on the topic of serial liars, is the 1976 book, “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics,” by Michael Wheeler. Below is a link to the Amazon page. Do yourself a favor and purchase it.
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-Damn-Statistics-Manipulation-Opinion/dp/0393331490
Next up, is the original Sports Illustrated article on Sidd Finch. Editors at the magazine noticed that a publication date occured on April 1 of that year and decided to make the most of it with one of the greatest April’s Fools Day pranks ever. They got renowned author George Plimpton to concoct a story about how a pitching phenom named Sidd Finch was going to bring the Mets to the pennant.3
One of the greatest essays of the last 20 years was called “On Bullshit” by Harry G. Frankfurt. Do yourself a huge favor and read this— its fantastic.
https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946
Lastly, not all lies and liars are bad. Some are done for good and altruistic reasons. Adolfo Kaminsky was a forger of documents who helped jews in World War II escape the holocaust. Read his story!
PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day
According to a study, the average person tells four lies a day. Over 50% of people say they are good at detecting lies. Less than 10% actually are good at detecting lies.
The most common lie told regularly? “It’s nice to see you.”
Ways you can get better at detecting lies:
https://psychcentral.com/blog/7-ways-to-spot-a-lie#:~:text=Look%20for%20flared%20nostrils%2C%20lip,as%20anxiety%20may%20set%20in.
Otherwise, there is a MasterClass for this sort of thing:
https://www.masterclass.com/classes/john-douglas-teaches-how-to-think-like-an-fbi-profiler?utm_campaign=Share&utm_medium=Copy&utm_source=class_guest_next
PurpleAmerica Cultural Criticism Corner
Mentioned above in the main article, all this George Santos news has me thinking a lot about Stephen Glass, the up and coming writer at The New Republic in the 1990s who authored stories almost too good to be true. Turns out they were. After being caught in his very obvious lies, an internal investigation at TNR found that most all of the stories he wrote contained fabrications.
They made a movie about this called, “Shattered Glass,” starring Hayden Christensen, Chloe Sevigny and Peter Sarsgaard. It’s an excellent film. Here is the trailer.
What you may not know is that after his journalistic fallout, he went to law school at Georgetown University. He passed the bar exam in both New York and California but was not admitted to practice law in either state on moral standing grounds. He appealed to the courts and the CA Supreme Court in 2013 unanimously shot him down with a brutal point by point takedown.
In 2000, while sorting out his legal issues, he met an eventually married lawyer Julie Hilden. After marrying, Hilden was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers and she died in 2018. There is an excellent piece about his life post-scandal, his case, how he’s tried to rehabilitate himself and his marriage that you can find here:
He is now a paralegal, working with a personal injury firm as a special projects manager.
Outstanding Tweet
Can’t disagree with this one…
Parting Thoughts
Let me know what you think of the page. Please share and comment!
Who is Sidd Finch? Only the greatest pitching prospect of all time!
Who’s Jay Gatsby? Oh just some guy F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about. Liked to throw parties. Had a cruch on a girl name Daisy.
The Mets won the World Series the year after the article was published.